Vote ID law is a waste of money

By Terri Burke

Updated 8:50 pm, Friday, April 13, 2012

In 1960, the Nixon presidential campaign charged that Fannin County, Texas, allowed more people to vote in that year's election than had paid poll taxes, the unconstitutional $1 to $2 ballot box admission fee once mandated by the state. Indeed, 6,138 ballots were cast in Fannin County when only 4,895 people had paid the poll tax. No charges were ever brought because it appears that much of the "fraudulent" voting may have been committed by people exempt from paying the poll tax: veterans and senior citizens and some other isolated groups.

The anecdote came to mind when I read the Chronicle's lead headline using the hot-button words "voter fraud" to describe 16 small counties that have more people registered to vote than live in them ("Is voter fraud a problem in Texas?," Page A1, April 9).

Anyone who read only the headline probably thought the story would - for the first time - confirm voter fraud and validate the need for photo voter identification at the polls. The new law requiring voters to produce photo ID at the polls was enacted by the last Legislature and is currently under challenge in federal court because the measure is actually designed to make it harder for the poor and elderly to vote.

A close reading of the story instead points out all the legal ways there could be more registered voters than population in a county and why this phenomenon doesn't represent voter fraud. Nonfraudulent voters who are uncounted residents may include college students legally voting where they attend school but who were counted as residents of their parents' homes in another county, and retirees from northern climates spending winters in Texas.

One of the story's more interesting points, however, was the admission by one voter registrar, who is also a sheriff, that many officeholders' extended families return to their home communities to vote for their relatives. One assumes these family members are using legitimate voter registration cards showing their addresses as the old family home. Or should they be considered fraudulent voters?

On the other hand, voter rolls may also include the names of people who are no longer eligible to vote because they have died or moved but their names haven't been purged.

Failure to clean up outdated names on voter rolls is a major problem in many counties. Why aren't voter rolls kept up to date? Because voter registrars have neither the money nor the manpower to carefully research and remove ineligible voters' names.

As one registrar said, "There's not dead people coming from the grave voting."

Contrary to the headline, the story makes this point: Texas does not have a problem with in-person voter fraud. Out of the 50 convictions in the past decade for voter fraud, only a handful of those even appear to be cases of in-person fraud, according to information supplied by none other than Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is vigorously defending the pointless photo voter ID law.

Though not needed, the Legislature passed the photo voter identification law that, based on estimates from the secretary of state, will cost about $3.5 million to implement. Costs will range from $75,000 for a rural county to $400,000 for an urban county to solve a nonexistent problem.

New York journalist Earl Mazo made a career out of trying to prove 1960 presidential election fraud. The Texas Legislature and Abbott can, like Mazo, continue to try to make their careers on this bogus issue. Or they can seriously launch a movement to reform our elections processes, spending those millions helping local registrars clean up their rolls.